This monthly event will feature live Jazz and is a great opportunity to see our Library at its finest. Wine and sparkling water will be available for a small fee and light snacks are complimentary. The series will take place from November 2014 through April 2015.

Presented by the Friends of the Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach

Friends Members $ 5.00/General Public $ 10.00

PLEASE NOTE: Registration for this event is not necessary, seating is first come, first served. We look forward to seeing you at Friday Night Jazz. Doors will open at 5:15 P.M.

Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have earned her widespread acclaim, establishing her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin.

It is the story of how a painful past, which Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted, rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging--for love, identity, home, and a mother. -- from Amazon.com

11:30 - 12:00 - Book Chatter

12:00 - 1:00 - Moderated Book Discussion

This is a brown-bag lunch event. Bring your own lunch or purchase lunch before you arrive from any downtown Merchant.

This event is free and open to Friends members and the public. All are welcome.

A fully realized portrait of one woman’s life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author

An ordinary life--its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion--lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott’s extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections--of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age--come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott’s deft, lyrical voice.

Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an “amadan,” a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott’s novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another.

Marie’s first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother’s brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents’ deaths; the births and lives of Marie’s children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn--McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today. -- from Amazon.com

11:30 - 12:00 - Book Chatter

12:00 - 1:00 - Moderated Book Discussion

This is a brown-bag lunch event. Bring your own lunch or purchase lunch before you arrive from any downtown Merchant.

This event is free and open to Friends members and the public. All are welcome.

This monthly event will feature live Jazz and is a great opportunity to see our Library at its finest. Wine and sparkling water will be available for a small fee and light snacks are complimentary. The series will take place from November 2014 through April 2015.

Presented by the Friends of the Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach

Friends Members $ 5.00/General Public $ 10.00

PLEASE NOTE: Registration for this event is not necessary, seating is first come, first served. We look forward to seeing you at Friday Night Jazz. Doors will open at 5:15 P.M.

JoinNew York Timescolumnist David Brooks for an in-depth discussion about what constitutes character as explored in his new book.

Some people seem to possess inner lives that are more substantive than the rest of ours. How do they do it? Depth, argues Brooks, is the core of our being and something we cultivate over time; it’s engraved by thought and action; it’s built through the commitments we make--to a nation, a faith, a calling or loved ones--and the sacrifices we endure because of those commitments.

Cost: Friends Members $5.00 General Public $10.00

Live from NY's 92nd Street (92YLive) is a live, satellite-broadcasted event, that allows people all over the nation to access the Y's cultural and educational programs.

PLEASE NOTE: Registration for this event is not necessary. Seating is first come, first served.

In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd--a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter for a decade to travel the world, giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he’s been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years. The novel intricately weaves together three timelines: the story of Greyson’s travels (Rome, Israel, Santiago, Thailand, Uganda); the progressive unraveling of his own father seen through Greyson’s childhood eyes; and the intricacies and estrangements of his marriage. The entire narrative unfolds in the time it takes him to undergo twelve 30-second electroshock treatments in a New York psychiatric ward.-- from Amazon.com

11:30 - 12:00 - Book Chatter

12:00 - 1:00 - Moderated Book Discussion

This is a brown-bag lunch event. Bring your own lunch or purchase lunch before you arrive from any downtown Merchant.

This event is free and open to Friends members and the public. All are welcome.